Tag: goals

Hello, Ramadan; I Ramble: 2 April 2022

In the name of Allah, The Most Beneficent, The Most Merciful.

Aaaand just like that it is Ramadan again! Woohoo!

I must say I have not started out very well but managed to pull myself back together to have a more decent go at this year’s Ramadan.

I decided not to do a Ramadan vlog series like I have done previously. Instead, I will just be posting daily on my Instagram feed. I have already started with a Hello Ramadan kinda post.

I think it will be good for me to get back to my prayer tree tracker. I want to see whether the change in my job/lifestyle has produced better results for me.

The red leaves are daily prayers, orange for terawih, and yellow for witr. I have until tomorrow’s Asar prayers to add on more red leaves for 1 Ramadan.

Yes, I know, my Ramadan efforts are pathetic. More power to you if you are able to establish eight terawih raka’ats and three witr raka’ats at least daily! My Ramadan starts are always weak admittedly. My next Ramadan goal is to start strong at eight raka’ats for terawih. But for this Ramadan, my intention is to slowly build up my stamina. I could not even pray five times a day religiously, what more carry out the sunnah prayers before/after the mandatory daily prayers. Naturally, I am spiritually weak and my heart is pretty dead. Ergo, I do not share the same drive as other Muslims in welcoming Ramadan.

But of course, I do not want to let my heart remain dead and my spirit weak forever. I have to start somewhere. So I figured, possible public humiliation and bewilderment through this post might give me the nudge I need to make myself a better Muslim.

I definitely want to do better in life and the Afterlife. In order to do that, I need to hold myself accountable.

Ya Rabb, please give me the strength to be a better person and Muslimah. Amin.

And Allah is Al-Mu’izz, The Honourer, The Bestower. – MM

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I Challenge: Boho Berry Challenge – December: Year-End Review (28 December 2018)

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

Wowsies. I actually did a challenge and completed it! Yay! It is the Boho Berry December Challenge!

Just click on the picture to know what it is all about. I’ve linked it to Boho Berry’s site regarding the challenge itself. I’m psyched to share my answers to the challenge right here.

Firstly, of course, I would like to thank my husband, Beedin, for supplying me with the notebook in which I did the journalling challenge.

It is just a small pocket notebook with blank pages in them, which proved useful in letting me doodle here and there. Thanks, Bee!

Secondly, I copied the list of topics in the challenge so I didn’t have to refer to my phone each time.

Yeah, I had a little fun handlettering the title but as you can see, I clearly lack spatial awareness. Just crammed the entire title up there on the page.

Next, I proceeded to do sort of a cover for the challenge. Was inspired by Amanda Rachel Lee’s December 2018 Bullet Journal set-up. Have a look at the following video.

Now have a look at my doodle. Bwahahahaha! So far away from her creation.

Then I went ahead with contributing to all of the topics.

1. Introductions

2. 2018 in Three Words

3. Favourite Memory

4. Biggest Accomplishment

5. Biggest Challenge

6. This Year, I…

7. Time Well Spent

8. Successes

9. Could Have Gone Better

10. Money Well Spent

11. Progress Towards Goals

Not going to share a sharp image of the above as I feel those goals are quite personal. But you can see them anyway if you put in the effort. HAHAHAHAHA!

12. New Skills Learnt

13. Breakthrough Moment

14. Smart Decisions

15. Good Habits Formed

16. Bad Habits Broken

17. Unfinished Business

18. Theme/Word for 2019

19. Start Doing

20. Keep Doing

21. Stop Doing

22. Out of My Comfort Zone

At this point of sharing, I believe I became less retrospective and more prospective instead. I think this topic should cover an event in 2018 where I got myself out of my comfort zone. Instead, I recorded what I would like to do in 2019 that would take me out of my comfort zone. But for the record, yeah, going on The Mummy ride for the second time sure was a step out of my comfort zone. All done for love’s sake! Hahahaha!

23. Setting Intentions

24. Something New

25. Self-care

I’ll just continue the sentence here: to…remain soft and smooth all year round.

26. Contribution, 27. Education & 28. Career

Once again, these turned out to be less retrospective than they were supposed to, I feel.

29. 2019 Will Feel Successful If…

30. Top Three 2019 Goals

31. Lessons Learned

There we go! Finally Huda has successfully completed a challenge! Yippy!

I must say that doing this exercise really helped me to have better ideas on how I’d like to plan out my 2019 Bullet Journal. I was really forced to sit and think through some of the topics. You can try it and you will also find that it can be tedious in certain aspects, especially when you are forced to think quite hard on life questions that you would sometimes prefer to leave unanswered. Muahahaha!

I hope everyone reading this would feel drawn to journalling and picking up similar challenges and more importantly, complete them. It would really organise your thoughts better and help you see your life from a different angle and reassess it.

Fun fact: It took me 40 minutes or so to do up this post, mostly in snapping the photos of the entries and positioning them under each heading. I wanted to start on my 2019 Bullet Journal but I’m starting to feel burnt out from just doing this post.

Yes, I have been feeling burnt out from doing little tasks recently. I think my depression is worsening but the reality is, I can never get it checked.

Because no one would believe me? Not sure. But I think it has been so overly glamourised that I much rather not deal with it.

Simple things have become so difficult to do. I take a longer time to do things that can be done in a minute or even a heartbeat.

And I feel so downright tired all the time.

Or maybe it’s just my diarrhea.

Welp.

And Allah is Ar-Razzaq, the Total Provider. – MM

I Ramble: 9 March 2017

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

A couple of woes:

  1. I have been trying to get up at 4am for the past two days and I have failed. I have absolutely no motivation to get up at 4am tomorrow either. Maybe waking up at 4am is a bit of a stretch. In order to achieve that, I should really start with 5am first. It is my 2017 goal anyway.
  2. I couldn’t make a smule video recording because it was lagging so badly. By the time I wanted to have an audio one instead, it was time for me to get out of the house. Looks like it will have to be a double recording. Well, at least I’m already familiar with Paranoid.

Well, besides that, I’m still on schedule. So, sorry, guys but you will have to wait until Friday morning for any musical update from me.

And Allah is Ar-Rafi, the Exalter. – MM

I Ramble: 3 January 2017

In the name of Allah, the All-Compassionate, the All-Merciful.

Yes, well, same old rhetoric. I actually penned down 17 goals for 2017 in my notebook but now that life happened, I will be focusing on one goal at a time and at the end of the year, I will see for myself just how many things I manage to achieve in 2017.

Goal #1: To wake up at 6.00am regardless of sleeping time. I just need that consistency everyday to allow me to have some time in the morning for my Quran during Fajr.

So far, I haven’t been consistent and even as I struggled to wake up at that time, I only managed to give le boyfriend a wake-up call before rolling over and falling asleep again. So until I can hit 10 days of consistency in achieving that goal, I won’t be working towards other goals yet.

However, I must say today is the eighth day that I read the Quran after Subuh prayers. I supposed this is a sub-goal that comes with the goal above. While I’m at it, I wanna read the English translation when I’m having my menses. I have been aiming to achieve that for years but it all kept going to the ocean. Haha!

So there we go, something to focus on in January.

And Allah is Ar-Rahim, the All-Merciful. – MM

I Ramble: 12 November 2016

In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

Hi! Well, it’s been very hectic for me. A lot of fatigue and my flu is not helping me much in that department. A lot of work and having to deal with crises is not helping me achieve the progress I long to see.

Still, I think I need to take a step back and realise that despite the imperfections and challenges we encountered during this musical project, we actually did relatively well considering our very short timeframe. I’m truly truly grateful for all the help and effort I have received for the project and I know, I am not the easiest nor the best person to work with, so that says a lot about the gratitude I feel for all of everybody’s hard work.

Alhamdulillah. Out of nowhere, help arrives whenever I need it most. I can’t even remember if I have ever talked about it here — that I had a meeting with my P in a bid to stick to the original plan of the project in raising monetary contribution to a welfare home. I offered to offload the costume cost and the P is trying to get a company to sponsor light f&b for the live performance of the musical. So our budget really diminished from a stunning $700 to $250 to the capital needed for the DVDs, which is about $50.

Well, guess what? A parent offered me blank DVDs for us to record the filming of the musical. OH. MY. GOD. Seriously, unexpected. It was like, heaven dropped those DVDs down to us. Ya Allah, thank you so much, ya Allah. Bless that parent. Bless all who have prayed for the smoothness of the project!

That basically brought our budget to $0. That means truly, all proceeds can go to the home as how I actually envisioned it to be from the very beginning. Alhamdulillah.

Well, another example of me receiving help when I least expect it is when A dropped by at work today to help rectify a supposed error for one of the play’s backdrops. Ya Allah. All I did was whine, whine, whine to A about it and then ehhhh, you serious ah you wanna help?! At first I was hesitant because I didn’t want to trouble him and he really should rest at home after working hard on the audio production for our play. But then I was really out of ideas on how to troubleshoot the error and if there is anything I have learnt, after countless times being scolded by my colleagues, is that I need to recognise when I have a certain limitation. After recognising that limitation, I then have to learn to accept other people’s help. Plus, time was of the essence, so okay, jump in, mate. Let’s get this thing done.

Aaaaaaand of course, just what was I expecting when A is around? Hahahaha! Don’t get me wrong, we were actually really productive, kudos to us! (Well, okay, he was more productive than I was hahahaha!) Besides troubleshooting the banner, he tutored me briefly on using Reaper and Audacity so I won’t be having problems during the DVD recording sessions from this coming Monday to Wednesday and he also transferred the audio clips I need for those sessions after discussing at length in finalising it. We also got to hash things out like grown-ups. I always welcome that. It’s good practice for me definitely. I know that if I want to be in a relationship, I want to stay in it for life. I don’t see the point of getting into a commitment and just breaking it off over ‘irreconcilable differences’. Let’s all face it, we are ALL different BUT we can make a positive difference in the way we communicate and interact. If ever there is a speedbump or a roadblock along the way, it is okay if you don’t talk about it at that very moment. Heck, it is also okay if you don’t talk about it the very next day. Just let that conversation naturally happen, when both have clear heads to talk about it. Trust me, people. You may do better by adopting my method HAHAHA, yeah, right. Well, actually, just try it because when you accept the uncomfortable situation, you indirectly accept the way the person is. So at the end of the day, you truly can say you accept your partner for his/her good and bad.

Damn, maybe I can be a love guru. HAHA! NOT! Wow, I absolutely digressed. Anyway, since we were both struck by the infamous hunger coma (hahaha!), we decided to grab lunch first before heading home. He even let me molest his handphone! Huahuahuahua! Well, actually it was more like, you take it or you take it. Eh, don’t get wrong ideas. I was actually being tutored on Clash of Clans. HAHAHAHA! Yes, the learning never ends with A around hahahaha! Well, it was good fun. I always enjoyed learning from him.

So yeah I started out the day full of dread but I am ending it with slight regret. I don’t know… Hanging out with A makes it feel like time just zooms by. Like ehhhh, I want more time, please. I don’t know… It’s like on one hand, I feel satisfied that I had a great day but on the other hand, I don’t feel satisfied because all too soon we have to part. Huh. Maybe I’m just the weird one. Oh, wells.

To summarise, today felt somewhat similar to our beach session, where we sat down and get a song done. Well, today we sat down and got things done as well.

Also, it was nice to hear him laugh a lot today. That man needs to laugh more! Each time he laughed, it was like an excitable minion in him was unleashed. The true happy side of him. Of course, I didn’t tell him this and I don’t intend to. Not like he reads my blog either. Muahahaha! But yeah, it was truly nice to see him relaxed and carefree. Seeing him like that made me forget all my worries. Really, we were just two people being merry and laughing at our own silly jokes instead of being two serious professionals.

So that’s about it. Eye-opening day but now it’s time for eye-closing. It’s 11pm and if I’m still going to try to achieve my goal of sleeping at 11pm, I should put some effort into it.

Guten nacht!

And Allah is Knower of all things. – MM

I Ramble: 1 May 2016

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

Happy Labour Day, everyone! I hope everyone is enjoying their long weekend! I know I have! However, the lack of sleep is killing my body. Ugh.

It’s that time of the month whereby I check my progress in achieving my 2016 goals. So far… very unsuccessful. Ha!

Anyway, I really have to get back to sleeping at 11pm and waking up at 5am. Until I nail that down, we are all going to have a problem with my lethargy, lack of productivity, and tardiness.

I have updated my goals. Those I have achieve and/or am consistent in achieving were struck out in black. Those I had to cancel or amend were struck out in red:

2016 goals updated 01052016

 

I have been wondering if I would do better in achieving those goals by having some sort of an anchor person or life coach who would help me keep on track. For waking up, I will just text my colleague upon waking up at 5am. They say it takes 21 days to form a habit? I will do that consistently for 21 days and see how it goes.

Alrighty. Right back what is wrong, we move along.

And He is Knower of all things. – MM